In the past, it has been shown that scattering microscopy using metallic nanoparticles can complement its fluorescence sibling as it uses an everlasting tag with no rate-limited amount of photons [1]}.
Metallic nanoparticles are stable, biocompatible and easy to synthesize and conjugate to biological targets and thereby ideal as contrast agents.
A landmark example of the biological application of such techniques was the direct observation of receptors hopping across previously unknown membrane domains. This provided valuable insight into the spatial regulation of signaling complexes and closed a 30-year controversy about the diffusion coefficients of membrane proteins [2]}.
While previous experiments using fluorescent tags yielded a diffusion coefficient in biological membranes much slower than the one observed in synthetic membranes, the fast acquisition speed (40 10\(^3\)  frames per second) enabled by scattering microscopy showed that this is the result of a fast diffusion and a slow hopping rate between domains [3]}.
